Resisting from the Margins

*Naqab (Negev) is a triangular-shaped expanse located in southern Levant in what constitutes the contemporary state of Israel. As a direct consequence of its geographical position, Naqab, like numerous places in the Middle East, encompasses a protracted and contested social history. Particularly, over the past several centuries, the region’s inhabitants have been subjected to complex and changing political trends that have defined and redefined the region’s national boundaries and administrative transactions. Naqab’s borders officially lie within Israel’s 1949 ceasefire agreement establishing its well-known ‘cartographical triangle shape’. Presently, the region of Naqab is formally recognized as Israel’s southernmost district occupying approximately 12,500 square kilometers, roughly three-fifths of the entire state. Despite its relative size in comparison to the rest of Israel, however, the events and the people residing in Naqab often go unnoticed by the international media in the midst of the on-going turmoil in downtown Israel and conflict along its disputed borders with the Palestinian Territories. Unlike areas such as the Golan Heights and Jerusalem, the legal status of Naqab remains by and large indisputable and the people living in the area retain Israeli citizenship. Nonetheless, Naqab has a distinctive social history, one that has shaped a multifaceted demographic landscape composed of a diverse range of people whose socio-political interactions are complicated yet innately entwined as residents of this vast desert setting. Bedouin have lived in Naqab over the past several centuries and now constitute approximately 30 % of the region’s population.

Customarily, a semi-nomadic people, the Naqab/Negev Bedouin have survived by farming and raising herds in the Negev desert for centuries. The Naqab Bedouin is also known in the Middle East as the badu (singular badawi), or ‘people that live in the desert.’ Badu is translated into English as Bedouin, a word supposed to have French origins. Throughout history, non-Bedouin groups such as villagers or fallahin have used the term badu to roughly ‘distinguish the pastoral nomadic activities, unique kingship relations, and other social and genealogical characteristics of this group of people in the region.’ The words Bedouin in English and Bedween (singular Bedwi) in Hebrew have also been appropriated by members since the creation of Israel especially in reference to particular characteristics of ‘being Bedouin’ such as Bedouin culture, integrity, garb, or cuisine. Most Naqab Bedouin contend that the term Bedouin is ‘a characterization made by others.’ Over a period of time the term Negev Bedouin, for instance, has evolved intricate socio-political norms, a situation made more convoluted with the insertion of categories such as Israeli Arab or Palestinian. The Bedouin residents of Naqab have perceived sweeping changes in their homeland and their socio-political interfaces due to the persistent ‘territorial conflict and national conquest’ over past centuries. Consequently, the characteristic expressions articulated by the Naqab Bedouin today are considerably dissimilar from those voiced by their ancestors.

The Naqab/Negev Bedouin currently constitute around 200,000 Palestinian-Arab citizens in Israel. Most of them reside in metropolitan Bi’r as-Saba (Beersheba) area in northern Naqab. Historically they have been administratively separated from the rest of the Arab population in Israel and until recent times, constituted a fringe within the Israeli and Palestinian political setting, being idealistically imagined as ‘socially and culturally distinctive.’ The Bedouin of the Naqab/Negev has been extensively reflected upon. They were initially studied by European travelers and colonial administrators. They have also been abundantly theorized by Israeli social scientists, as a result of which, a rather rich canvas of ethnographic scholarship has evolved. However the past decade has seen a change in the ‘wider knowledge production,’ as well as the ‘political profile’ of the Naqab/Negev Bedouin. This has possibly restructured the study of the community more extensively within ‘Palestine studies,’ within studies of ‘indigenous peoples,’ and within a range of other ‘new approaches.’ Earlier readings have begun with the definition of the Naqab/ Negev Bedouin society as entailing the miniscule residue of the Arabs inhabiting the region prior to 1948. Critical studies, which have evolved in comparatively recent times, have conceived the Bedouins as a peripheral minority within a ‘centralizing, ethnic state’ subjected to various ‘deprivations and marginalities.’ An additional contemporary approach has perceived the Bedouins as fragments of the divided Arab or Palestinian nation, involved in a continuing tussle with the Israeli state. By and large, the traditional Israeli scholarship considered the Bedouins as only a marginal community, a relegated modernizing minority striving to adapt to life in what they perceive as a modern democratic Western society. They overlooked the aspect of ‘dispossession, forced movement, refugees and constant struggle with the Israeli authorities for land, development and housing rights.’

The conflict over land between the state of Israel and its Bedouin citizens is a multifaceted one. The legal aspects constitute only a fragment of the entire story as historical, social, financial, cultural and ethnic issues are at play. Moreover, land disputes between nomads and state authorities are not confined and peculiar to Israel. They are found to exist in many countries with nomadic populations. In fact, the states of the Middle East have continually treated the Bedouin as second-class citizens. Their contention is that the contribution of the Bedouin to the region’s national economies is limited and that they remain detached from the settled population by raising animals merely for their subsistence. Their nomadic way of life was regarded as nothing but an attempt to wriggle out of civil obligations, such as military service and payment of taxes. The rationale behind settling the Bedouins was to make them ‘more productive and more governable.’ In recent times, conscious attempts have been made by governments in the region to assimilate nomadic and semi-nomadic Bedouin populations into sedentary society. The general trend is to settle nomads by establishing farming or manufacturing cooperatives to enable them to survive in their new environment. In all such endeavors, the state plays the decisive part in constructing both the ‘policy environment’ and the ‘spatial reorganization’ which in turn encourage sedentarization.

Equally, during the Ottoman rule and the period of British Mandate in Palestine, processes of spontaneous sedentarization were observed among both Negev and Galilee Bedouin. However the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 led to the formation of a ‘new socio-political and demographic situation’ and the sedentarization process was discontinued. The Israeli authorities initiated new types of sedentarization. In contrast to many other Middle Eastern Bedouin communities, the Naqab/Negev Bedouin were completely sedentarized when the Israeli government began to implement its settlement programs. Thus, these programs were not intended primarily at ‘settling a previously highly mobile population;’ instead the objective was to expel this population from its lands and to relocate it in another place. Forced settlement and migration has been the distinguishing feature of Israeli government policy toward the Bedouin, even though eventually it appears to have been voluntary. In its yearning to procure Bedouin lands, the state has effectively not left out any Bedouin family from some kind of encounter with the authorities. Sedentarization as a settlement policy was employed as an authorized instrument to transmute Bedouin land into state land as well as multiple methods were used to expel, displace and relocate Bedouin groups from their land so as to make such a transmutation a reality.

In September 2011, the Israeli government approved a five-year economic development plan called the Prawer Plan. One of its implications would have been the relocation of some 30,000-40,000 Negev Bedouin from areas not recognized by the government to government-approved townships. This would require Bedouins to leave ‘ancestral villages, cemeteries and communal life’ that they have been accustomed to. Critics of the Prawer Plan contended that it would turn Bedouin dispossession into law and could result in compelling the Bedouin to relocate. It was also censured on the grounds that it could lead to a form of ethnic cleansing. Several members of the European Parliament severely criticized the plan. Bedouin, Palestinian and Israeli activists staged a ‘Day of Rage’ against the Prawer Plan on November 30, 2013, holding rallies and protests throughout Israel and Palestine, with international solidarity protests taking place in cities across the world, one among the many ‘days of rage’ mass protests. As the Israeli government announced that it had withdrawn the bill that proposed the expropriation of land and the forcible transfer of tens of thousands of Bedouins from 35 unrecognized villages in the Naqab/Negev desert in the south of present-day Israel, there was widespread celebration among the Bedouins in particular and the larger Palestinian community in general as well as the Israeli activists who had joined the protests. Adalah, the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel, called the withdrawal of the Prawer Plan bill as a major achievement in the history of the Palestinian community in Israel.

The Middle East has recently experienced what has been categorized as the ‘Arab Spring’ which despite its limitations did signify, albeit fleetingly a period of substantial transformation in the region wherein large numbers of people were protesting, advocating, demonstrating, and publicly voicing their hunger for change. The activists became crucial players in regional politics and activisms was progressively associated with people’s struggles for ‘political, social, economic rights in the Middle East.’ The Bedouins of Naqab/Negev carried forward this new found belief in protests initiated by the much criticized ‘Arab Spring,’ with the larger Arab population joining hands to organize nationwide protests even as ‘home demolitions’ continue to be carried out by the state.

*Negev is the Hebrew word for the desert and semi desert region in southern Israel while Naqab is the Arabic word. Since the creation of the state of Israel, the term Negev is used to indicate the region.

Priya
21/05/17

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